Let’s have a look at a long-term perspective on Treasury yields as of Friday’s close. The chart below shows the 10-Year Constant Maturity yield since 1962 along with the Federal Funds Rate (FFR) and inflation. The range has been astonishing. The stagflation that set in after the 1973 Oi...

On the “Real Investment Hour” on Tuesday night, I addressed the issue of price versus fundamentals. In the short-term, a period of one-year or less, political, fundamental, and economic data has very little influence over the market. This is especially the case in a late-stage bull market adva...

Our friends at Elliott Wave International (EWI) regularly put out great free content on their site. If you’ve visited their site before, you may have seen “Chart of the Day,” a featured series of videos that take a quick, but close examination of a chart from one of EWI’s pai...

You can almost hear the announcer for the movie trailer; “In a world stricken by financial crisis, a country plagued by spiraling deficits and cities on the verge of collapse – a war is being waged; gauntlet’s thrown down and at the heart of it all; two dead white guys battling over the fate o...

“There is nothing wrong with America that the faith, love of freedom, intelligence, and energy of her citizens cannot cure.” – Dwight D. Eisenhower “If we just stick together, and remain true to our ideals, we can be sure that America’s greatest days lie ahead.” – Ronald Reagan Hope ...

Here is a summary of the four market valuation indicators we update on a monthly basis. The Crestmont Research P/E Ratio (more) The cyclical P/E ratio using the trailing 10-year earnings as the divisor (more) The Q Ratio, which is the total price of the market divided by its replacement cost (more...

Over the last couple of week’s, volatility has certainly picked up. As shown in the chart below, stocks have vacillated in a 1.5% trading range ever since the beginning of June. (Chart through Thursday) Despite the pickup in volatility, support for the market has remained firm. Importantly, this...

At the end of June the inflation-adjusted S&P 500 index price was 99% above its long-term trend, unchanged from the previous month. About the only certainty in the stock market is that, over the long haul, over performance turns into under performance and vice versa. Is there a pattern to this ...

Here is the latest update of a popular market valuation method using the most recent Standard & Poor’s “as reported” earnings and earnings estimates and the index monthly average of daily closes for the past month. For the earnings, see the table below created from Standard &am...

The borrower is the servant of the lender, and through the mechanism of government debt virtually the entire planet has become the servants of the global money changers.  Politicians love to borrow money, but over time government debt slowly but surely impoverishes a nation.  As the elite get gov...

Janet Yellen, Federal Reserve Chair, recently stated; “Will I say there will never, ever be another financial crisis? No, probably that would be going too far. But I do think we’re much safer and I hope that it will not be in our lifetimes and I don’t believe it will.”  That is a pretty b...

Last week, I received the following email from a reader which I thought was worth further discussion. “In a recent article “Signs of Excess – Crowding and Innovation” Lance stated ‘Note the chart above is what has happened to a $100,000 investment in the S&P Index. While the S&P ...

Yesterday, I addressed the issue of how market innovations and “crowding” into specific trades have been signs of market excesses in the past. To wit: “That is the cycle of innovation in the financial marketplace. Despite the best of intentions, and advances in innovation, humans will always ...

The NYSE has released new data for margin debt, now available through May. The New York Stock Exchange publishes end-of-month data for margin debt on the NYX data website, where we can also find historical data back to 1959. Let’s examine the numbers and study the relationship between marg...

I have regularly written about the many shortcomings of human psychology when it comes to investing. More importantly, while the emotions of “greed” and “fear” are the predominant drivers of not only investor behavior over time, they are also attributable to the development and delivery of t...

All eight indexes on our world watch list have posted gains for 2017 through June 26. The top performer thus far is China’s Hang Seng with a gain of 17.60%, followed by India’s BSE SENSEX not far behind at 16.94%. In third is our own S&P 500 with 8.94%. The Last Four Weeks The table...